Papantonio: What Was Missed About President Trump?

Trump says his transition is going ‘so smoothly’, but what does it really mean having the Republican Party with the control in Washington? Ring of Fire’s Mike Papantonio and Sam Seder discuss this topic.

Transcription of the above video:

Sam:
Earlier this week, on Wednesday, Donald Trump tweeted that ‘The transition is going so smoothly,’ I guess to assuage concerns, because the transition is not going smoothly.

One of the things that occurs to me is that we have really 2 or 3 major disasters that are involved, potential disasters with the Trump presidency. One is what I call the Mike Pence version. Even if Donald Trump was to disappear tomorrow and Mike Pence was to become president, we would still have a, well, and particularly with Mike Pence, it’s another ilk. He’s a huge fundamentalist. We would have close to a theocracy.

But we would still have a conservative dominated government, Republican dominated government, that will mean everything from the destruction of our social safety net, the destruction of our social insurance, the erosion of our regulatory state, the diminishment of right of in particularly women, but across the board. I mean, just to name a few things. But with Donald Trump, we also have the single least experienced and perhaps most emotionally unstable president in at the very least a century, I would argue probably about 150 years. He has appointed, so far, in terms of what we know and is his staff, people who have no experience in government. Even Reince Priebus has experience only as a political operative in the Republican party. No one who has any sense of what each part of the executive branch does. We’re in a very precarious situation here.

Mike:
Well, let me ask you this. Yeah, we are. Everything you just said had to be said, but I think at this point, after this last week, most of it goes without saying when we start looking at these appointments. John Bolton, really? Gee, Newt Gingrich, [inaudible 00:02:24]. It doesn’t take a lot of guesswork at this point. I think people came into this, and people are optimistic. They want to be optimistic. They don’t want to freak out too long for no good reason. The truth is, right now, I’m not seeing anything that says, gee whiz, we were wrong. Before we go on, is there anything you’re seeing. Because I don’t want this to be just a repeat of what we talked about in the lead up to the election. But right now are you seeing anything that you go, ‘Wow, maybe we were wrong because of ______.’

Sam:
Wrong in terms of what Donald Trump is going to do with the country?

Mike:
Yeah.

Sam:
No. I don’t think that there’s anything that is, I think that we were anticipating him at this point. You know, although, I will say this, that I think the idea, if you had said– I think it’s worse, frankly, at this stage, and you know, we don’t know what’s going to happen, but I think it’s worse at this stage in some respects, than I think we had the imagination to contemplate prior to the election.

Mike:
That is disturbing.

Sam:
And I’ll tell you why I say that.

Mike:
To hear you say that is very disturbing.

Sam:
Because you have someone like Frank Gafney, who is a lunatic crank neocon, who sees the Muslim Brotherhood not only as infiltrated the US government, but even folks like Grover Norquist. This guy’s part of the transition team, ostensibly to look at, I guess, national security issues. We have a white nationalist antisemite, who is a special adviser to Donald Trump. There’s no, look, there’s no confirming this guy. There’s no nothing. We have seen already the aggressiveness of the Trump family to exploit the presidency for money. These type of things, like, I thought–

Mike:
Okay, well, you understand what I wanted to do. I really wanted to start the program by saying, ‘Is there anything we missed?’ When I had to think about it, probably not. Maybe I’ve got something that we have some hope for. But I think as I listen to you, I really want to start out, I just want to listen to you, what your take on it was and see if, well gee whiz, there’s something that I really disagree with you on.

Let me tell you one thing that I don’t know whether this has any legs or not. But you know, there was early on some discussion by Trump about the infrastructure in the United States. You remember that? Obama’s done a terrible job, and for the most part he’s right, where it comes to the infrastructure. We’ve just not moved ahead really at all. The early days of Obama, you might recall we said, “Look, President Obama, you have 2 years now. You’ve got the House. You’ve got the Senate. You can do some wonderful things.” One of the major topics that I remember talking about was the infrastructure. Because if you take control of the infrastructure, we can pull ourselves out of this dismal abyss that we’re looking at from the housing burn down. We can move the economy again. Again, like Obama is become so famous for, he gave a great speech about it, 2 great speeches about it, and then nothing happened.

Sam:
We had a stimulus. There was a couple hundred million dollars as part of that stimulus. But it was not nearly enough.

Mike:
It was almost a joke, okay? The real issue for stimulus was, build roads, build bridges, build new airports, take care of our dams, take care of our water supply, take care of our infrastructure in every regard. There was no activity.

Now what I, let me just juxtapose that and talk about Trump from the standpoint of a guy that has spent more money, got more loans, been bankrupt more than most people. Four bankruptcies. But he nevertheless is willing to go out and get big loans. Now you’ve got an interest rate right now that is historically low. It’s going to stay low for a while. My prediction. Now is the time for him, isn’t it, to say, “Okay, let’s put some bonds out there. Let’s go to Saudi Arabia, these people that want to remain our friends, and let’s sell them some bonds, and let’s put together a couple trillion dollars, paid off over 50 to 100 years, and let’s build our infrastructure.”

Now if you’re Saudi Arabia, you’re saying that’s a great idea because the American economy is the engine for the world economy. What I’m saying is, Trump was talking about early on, where is that now? Are you hearing any discussion about, ‘I’m going to go, first thing I’m going to do is deal with this infrastructure problem.’

Sam:
Well, I’ll tell you, he’s floating it. We don’t know yet. I think they’re in such disarray there. But later in this program I’m going to talk to David Dane about that infrastructure program, because it’s not quite as cracked up as what it sounds like.